A new chapter in my life, a new era for the blog

It has been almost 13 months since my last publication in the blog, you could say it has a lost year for my small corner in the Internet and that would be true. However it has not been a lost year for me personally, not at all. Many things happened during all these months, the most obvious of course is the COVID-19 health world crisis, I am grateful because me and my family are doing fine and I sincerely hope that you and your families are all healthy and safe.

On the professional side 2020 has been a tipping point for me. I started the year with some incredible news about being selected for an internal program at Microsoft for architects in the field that would allow me to join an Azure engineering team for a full semester. Yes working in an Azure product group for six months! The service was no other than Azure VMware Solution, imagine that I was given the opportunity to work with oow of my favorite technologies at the same time. But those were not the best news, because the new iteration for the AVS service was being planned and developed at that time. I joined the team at the perfect time!

My tenure in the programs kicked-off in January, I was able to spend two full weeks in Redmond between January and February working face to face with the team and learning everything in plan and development for the whole year, and the rest fo the time remotely from Madrid. I started to work in different part of the service, learning a lot from my new colleagues and actively participating in first limited private preview, than COVID happened but and we all went full remote as we still are. But of course that did not stop us, the team doubled the effort and we got the service to public preview, announcement included, just before Microsoft Build.

It was an amazing experience for me, learning from all the great engineers and PMs in the team and of course learning all the Azure internals, I was like a little kid every time I learned something new about our internal architecture, the networking details, etc. In June I got even better news, the program was extended for a few more months to give us the opportunity of finishing the work we were doing with our engineering peers before going back to our original field teams. ANd finally at the end of September during Microsoft Ignite the service went into GA! I could not be happier, in nine months I had been able to witness and be part of the GA process for an Azure service. And then it happened, I was offered a permanent position in Azure VMware Solution team… YES!

The two managers in the team and our director gave me the incredible opportunity of joining their team, the same team I had been working with for nine months. In November I officially joined as Senior Program Manager. If you are asking yourself if I will move to Redmond when all this COVID shit is over the answer is no, I will stay in Madrid which is perfect for me since I cannot move to the US for personal reasons, at least for now.

So reflecting back 2020 has been a great year for me in many ways, I have been to achieve a goal I set many years ago whe I was working at VMware, to join an engineering team and stay in Spain at the same time. I cannot express how grateful I am for this, specially to Eduardo, Ram and Brett who decided to trust me and to my former manager Manuel who supported me in this journey.

Of course as you can imagine my involvement with the AVS team in 2020 was the main reason to not update my blog, I was focused working on the service and of course everything I was working on was confidential. Along this past year I have been thinking a lot about what to do with the blog, my first though was to follow the trend and migrate it to Hugo and move it out of GitHub Pages, but to be honest I have no issues with Jekyll and GitHub Pages provides me with all I need for now, maybe in the future I will consider to move it to Azure Blob Storage but will see.

What the blog really need was a facelift, I was still running an old version of the Minimal Mistakes theme with some custom modifications and CSS style sheets. I considered to use a new Jekyll theme but in the end I decided to update the theme to its latest version. Upgrading it was relatively easy, although it was a manual process since I was running a very old version. I did not have to implement any extra configuration since the current version provides everything I need. It took me a couple of days to migrate and review all the articles, fix DISQUS comments and fix some old typos in a few articles. I will continue to review it in the coming weeks since I want to clear up the mess I have in the content tags and post categories.

Regarding the content, my intention is to continue to write about my work since that has been the main theme of the blog since I started it in 2009, will continue to write about Kubernetes because is still part of my professional life. VMware content of course will come back to some extent and I want to expand the content to other areas I am interested in like distributed systems, software development, blockchain, Linux, my personal 3D printing and maker projects at home and many more.

Again please stay safe, take care of yourselves and your families and let this 2021 begin, I am sure it will be fantastic!

–Juanma